Sigh. I tried to foster some discussion on guidelines. Even less interest than for a registered users forum!

It's not just the abuse of minors and coaches issue. It's like the Hatfield's and McCoy's over there between these rival league supporters.

Not sure guidelines are going to change things much. There is so much abuse that you'd need to visit it every day to clean it up.

I have been keeping tabs on the other discussion, as well as the second thread here about creating separate girls and boys forums. It doesn't seem like there is much consensus. From my perspective, threads/forums can operate in various ways:

1) everyone posts appropriate for the most part and I hardly ever get involved;

2) frequent inappropriate posts get reported, I respond to the report, and remove the post.

3) I get reports along the lines of "this thread has gone off the rails can you do something about it?" and find a 15 page thread that turned into a disaster on page 2. I have to wade through pages of posts trying to figure out what is going on and attempting to salvage it. Frequently, locking or deleting the thread is the best resolution.

While I am thrilled when we have cases of alternative 1, I can live with alternative 2. I really hate alternative 3.

The soccer forum is one never-ending alternative 3.

What I think may be the best course of action would be to establish very clear guidelines for the forum. For instance, thread titles should include a tag indicating whether they are for "[Girls]", "[Boys]", or "[General]". I can strictly enforce this and immediately delete any thread that does not adhere to the guideline.

We need to find an appropriate guideline for addressing identifiable individuals. This is tricky because I am not sure how you discuss a sport without taking about the players and coaches involved in the sport. As the same time, the players are just kids and much of the criticism of coaches has gone beyond what is acceptable (e.g. accusations of inappropriate sexual relations with children). Maybe you guys can come up with a guideline with which ou are comfortable?

If forum users are diligent in reporting posts that violate the guidelines, I can remove them quickly. But, I can't read the forum 24/7 trying to enforce the guidelines myself. This will require the users' cooperation. Hopefully, we can establish a new tone for the forum quickly, after which very little intervention will be necessary.

jsteele wrote:Could you please start a thread in the Soccer forum to get feedback from other posters on this idea? The soccer forum is enough of a headache for me that I would certainly consider this idea if there were support for it.

So the debate continues over there https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/878912.page. I was about to say "rages on" but that hardly seems appropriate. There are about as many people advocating as not, with the "nots" main complaint being about having to be accountable. Even those could be interpreted as a positive vote in a way I suppose.

You mention the soccer forum being a headache, and I am guessing that is because it generates an inordinate number of "reports" and complaints that require intervention on your part. Thinking about it from your perspective, establishing a parallel registered users soccer forum would probably not help in this regard, you would probably have to jump in with both feet and make the whole thing registered users only to fix that. That would definitely reduce the frivolous posts but it might lower traffic quite a bit. From that perspective, doing nothing might seem attractive. But still, plenty of other sites operate "registered only" with good results. Curious to hear your thoughts.

Done!

Could you please start a thread in the Soccer forum to get feedback from other posters on this idea? The soccer forum is enough of a headache for me that I would certainly consider this idea if there were support for it.

The soccer forums are almost unusable for anything but bashing others these days. Jeff Steele is there any way we can try a registered users only subtopic in there? Online Soccer forums seem that do not allow anonymous posting have a much higher signal/noise ratio.